- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 18:20:53 +0300
On Jul 12, 2006, at 17:57, Robin Lionheart wrote: > Henri Sivonen wrote: >> And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a >> string on a Web page is a human name? > Off the top of my head, a couple possible benefits of tagging > proper names: > > * smarter search engines > (<name>Bill Gates</name> is not the words "bill" and "gates". > Could be beneficial to newspaper sites.) For the search engines internal to news sites this could be implemented using a private extension if it was deemed worth the trouble. As for general search engines, this isn't really a problem. If I Google for "bill gates", I get results about Bill Gates--not about invoice stages or something similarly contrived. And I am pretty sure that if Google or a competitor wanted to do something smart with names on Web pages, they'd be better off seeding a guessing machine with phone book data than by insisting that everyone change their markup. > * speech synthesis > (Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has "interpret-as: > name" and VoiceXML has interpret-as="name") "The interpret-as property has been temporarily dropped until the Voice Browser working group has further progressed work on the SSML <say-as> element." ...says the latest CCS3 Speech WD. I don't see interpret-as="name" in VoiceXML 2.0 or 2.1. > * spell checking > (Usable by Web page editing software) Spell checkers work just fine without knowing what words are names. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Thursday, 13 July 2006 08:20:53 UTC